Book Review: The Rainbow and the Worm by Mae-Wan Ho
Great book. Read it.
Mae-Wan Ho is tackling very difficult questions in this book. And while I do not agree with some of it, and find her sometimes reaching into foggy ideas for explanations, the book itself will, I sincerely hope, make it into many libraries and become cited by many future researchers.
I found several highlights in the book.
The first highlight is the experimental technique that she stumbled upon because the expert in polarimetry was not in the lab so she and her students needed to try and figure out how to use the polarimeter. To see, with rainbow light, the coordinated cellular movements of small living creatures does rekindle the awe. There is no known mechanism for it, and good luck rigorously applying any thermodynamics to it!
The second highlight is the ideas around propagation speeds of electrical signals through water in microtubules. Many massage therapists and acupuncturist will tell you that there are communication channels in the body that are not nerve, and which have a speed that seems sometimes faster than any accepted communication channel. Also, within individual cells, almost every macromolecular response happens way too fast for thermodynamics (diffusion) to be the cause. For example, any of the many multi-step pathways, like converting a single light photon to the nerve cell firing. She holds back a bit, but basically NONE of the known biological molecular pathways can be explained through diffusion. Anyway, a microtubule has a large enough opening inside for basically one water molecule. So you can fill the tube with a line of water molecules. Then, like those desk toys with the swinging stainless steel balls, when you throw an electron at the water molecule at one end, very quickly the water molecule all the way on the other end of the tube shoots out an electron. The propagation of that signal seems substantially faster than nerve signals. The fascia system of the body is now finally getting some attention. It is an integrated system, right up there with circulatory, immune, endocrine, etc. We still have a long way to go to understand. But finally a whole class of physical therapists might be vindicated as we start to explore the physical mechanism for how doing something to a person's feet can instantly trigger a release all the way up to their neck.
The third highlight was her attempts to bring levels, or scales into the scientific discussion. Why has contemporary western science been cursed by this inability to recognize higher and lower levels? I was talking to a Shakespeare scholar, and he said that during the reign of Elizabeth this "horizontalization" took place very notably in the trashing and anathematizing of John Dee. So, I guess it was not only physical sciences, but also philosophy and theater. Mae-Wan Ho introduces various ways to consider higher and lower levels, especially while trying valiantly to keep thermodynamics relevant.
She includes a lot of Thermodynamics, maybe half the book. I have never seen the need to apply thermodynamics to living systems, so I had to make an effort to stick with those parts. She clearly needs to work through it because she HAS tried very hard to apply thermodynamics to living systems. These days, if you are considered a "serious" scientist you have to apply thermodynamics to everything. I hope her presentation will convince more "serious" scientists that even the most basic thermodynamic concepts are extremely problematic to apply in living systems. Not being able to define your basic quantities the researcher is free to "wave hands", or invent their own altered definitions, or postpone the effort and put attention on the more applicable concepts.
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